Public Speaking

Louws: The best Public Speaking Coaches in the business.

A bold statement, but one that can be fully backed by facts we would invite anyone to compare.

~ 550+ Companies, over 30 years of training and consulting experience, with some 150,000 students in 26 Countries and 80 cities in North and South America ~

But. What are the results of all this work?

Case in point:

“Louws has helped me personally for 20 years and the two businesses I’ve run fully leveraging the power of communication. I would enthusiastically endorse Louws to any company that wants to communicate, sell and lead at a higher level.”… Mike Rawlings, current Mayor of Dallas (former CEO of Pizza Hut and Tracy Locke)

The unique differences between Louws and everyone else

There are 3 very distinct differences that have created skill sets and techniques known only to those whom Louws has taught and coached, which has led to this most common and peculiar accolade: “We hope you never get hired by anyone else”.

Difference #1:Contemporary Relevance

Recognizing that you are only as good as your last performance, in its infancy, Louws implemented a standing order that requires every training skill, technique, process and approach to be updated and upgraded every 3 years.

This is the single most important reason why in 2011 we are still helping companies achieve the same robust results as we were back in the 80’s.

Its Executive Trainers and Consultants have counseled and trained many of the most noteworthy brands in the world.

♦ From JWT to Saatchi

♦ BBDO to Arnold

♦ Wunderman to The Martin Agency

♦ OMG to GroupM

♦ Razorfish to R & R Partnership

♦ Burson Marsteller to Golin Harris

♦ Shandwick to Fleishman-Hillard

Difference #2: Training & Coaching – it’s our business

Since 1984 Louws has been a Training, Coaching and Consulting firm.

Each Louws’ Executive Trainer is a certified Trainer who has been through one of the most intense and grueling 18 month Teaching, Training, Coaching and Consulting programs of its kind.

[The inventor of the Louws’ Train the Trainer program – Toni Louw – is a former rugby player and world class swimmer. Now you understand the motivation behind the rigor.]

This training however, is completely independent of the 1 – 2 years each Louws’ Trainer has to then endure, learning the specific subject matter they intend to train such as Sales Training, Management and Leadership skills, Negotiating skills or Brand and Marketing consulting.

Why is this important?

As with an MBA or NFL coach, not at liberty to dunk the ball or throw the touchdown, a Louws’ trainer is similarly not at liberty to sell the strategy or convince the prospect how the agency will improve searches CPC’s.

Louws’ New Business Consultants are trainers – trained to get others to perform – and not just share historical anecdotes or reminisce about their own past successes.

Difference #3: A different approach to the subject of Public Speaking

Common training curriculums contain one or more of the following misguided disciplines:

a. Eye Contact. How does this help if the presenter is petrified of his audience or so engrossed in his own content that merely looking at the audience makes him forget his place?

b. Voice Modulation. As important a skill as this is, how do you avoid making the presenter so conscious of what they are now doing that they forget their lines and completely ignore audience responses?

c. Gestures. Critical to emphasis but ludicrously taught by trying to co-ordinate a hand chop with a key presentation point, making the presenter appear robotic and awkward.

d. Energy Level. Important yes, but not at the expense of turning the presenter into a marionette who the audience privately ridicules.

These are all products of the 1970’s where each became the fad and consequently the thing to teach, with public speaking trainers priding themselves in sitting in the back of the classroom and counting the number of “ums” inexplicably escaping the jaws of speakers.

In essence, training has traditionally focused pointedly on the symptoms – the “what’s” of poor public speaking skills and failed miserably in its duty to resolve the “why’s”.

How Louws addresses these symptoms is unique in the business.

Approach #1 – Outcome

Louws has developed all its training by focusing on the expected outcome and not the curriculum to be taught.

In the case of Public Speaking, the critical outcome is most often that “the audience is collectively persuaded to a point of view or common consensus”.

Take Eye Contact. Is it more important to get an A+ for having it, or more critical the presenter observes audience responses to know whether or not they are buying in and based on these observations, re-adjust the speech when necessary?

In almost all cases where a Louws’ student was previously trained in eye contact, they were so focused on the eyes, they did not see their audience and thus inevitably did not respond well.

Therefore, Louws works on the skills and techniques necessary to achieving buy in and not the symptomatic manifestations of supposed “best practice” speakers.

Approach #2 – Contrarianism

As odd as this might sound, it has been the key to Louws’ phenomenal success over the past 3+ decades and why even today it has the longest client tenure of all training companies in the business.

It started in the early 80’s with Toni Louw recognizing, as a partner in the then leading public and presentation skills training company in the world, that most all training in these skills followed the same basic patterns. Here are some that you may recognize.

a) Work on speaker’s delivery skills in terms of their eye contact, gestures, movement and voice modulation.

This also affords an immediate interaction opportunity with the audience and allows them to find at least one thing in which they are interested.

♦ Ensure there are no more than 3 bullet points and 10 words per bullet.

Oftentimes, a single illustration, chart, video clip or digital example will suffice for a bullet point, where adding the bullet point to the illustration makes the illustration redundant and vice versa.

For a solution Louws learned from Hollywood, commercial artists and architects whose world revolves around the limitless possibilities of illustrations over words, a multi-billion dollar a year business.

Our ultimate goal: The Redundancy of Louws

Retaining a speaker coach is far more than hiring a pitch guru or someone who has great references.

These help but are a far cry from fulfilling the requirements necessary to consistently repeat success.

Successful speakers are like great athletes.

Every win is a culmination of many small things done very right, again and again, constantly adjusted for the competition and the whims of new fancy and fad.

And this is what Louws promises to deliver, so that by the time we are done, you will no longer need us.

After all, if we do our job right, the speaker should eventually become their own coach.

Next Steps:

If what you have read so far is consistent with what you are looking for from a Public Speaking training company, please consider giving Louws an opportunity to make good on what we promise to deliver.

“You make us superb at the art of public speaking. There is never a speech that does not get the Louw treatment. It has helped us capture audiences, move them to action and importantly given us the confidence to know how good we can actually be.”